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Welcome to another brain doodle as it happens deep inside my brain. Now some might suggest that inside my brain is a scary place to be but if you hold on tight I'm sure you'll emerge at the other end of the trip with hardly a scrape or a bruise. You may be upside down ... or even inside out ... but hey - sometimes you just have to live life on the edge.

Of course I can't guarantee that you'll learn anything of any use while you're inside my head but maybe you can pick up a wisp of an idea and run with it. On the other hand perhaps it's just a case of garbage in and garbage out but you won't know until you've followed some of the twisted paths of my mind. So come on in and see where my thoughts are heading.

Have you ever thought that those dreaded people that we all love to trash - the spammers - might have something to teach us? Yeah I know we're website and gallery builders and we never resort to any dirty tricks like the spammers do. We're honorableand trustworthy, we take care of little old ladies and get warm and fuzzy over small puppies.

But the spammers are wicked and evil and want to rip you off. They want to get inside your computer and steal all your data and do lots of other evil things ... and they probably feed small puppies to the sharks. So what could they possibly have to teach us?

Perhaps the answer is that they could have plenty to teach us. Think about it for a few minutes as I compare what we do with what they do and you might begin to see what I mean.

On our sites and galleries we offer lots of free porn interspersed with advertising that we hope surfers will see and respond to. It's a tough business because the people we are trying to attract with our advertising are racing through the sites and galleries we build looking for the free porn we offer and that's all they think they want. These days it's getting harder and harder to get people to see our advertising.

The spammers send their messages out to millions of people who have an email address; much of their work ends up in spam folders but there's always some that gets through. But that's only half the battle for the spammers because, even if their spam does get into an inbox, they then have a tough job getting people to actually open those emails.

So what do they have to teach us? Well there's something that they use in their emails and we use in our advertising that can attract surfers and readers and that thing is the headline or what is otherwise known as the subject line. The single line that attracts the attention of the surfers when they're hitting our site and the people at home or at work who are scanning the emails in their inboxes.

Now some spammer headlines are obviously weak and we know as soon as we scan them that they're nothing but rubbish. In fact they're so obvious that even our spam filters pick them up but there are plenty of headlines that spammers use that are not obviously spam. Not only are those headlines not so obviously spam but they tend to jump off the page at us and make us stop and think about opening the email.

Now why don't we sit back and think about using similar headlines like that for the advertising on our sites? 'm not suggesting that we should use crappy headlines such as 'enhance your sexual desire' or 'wanna larger penis' because those subject lines are just a waste of time. Everybody has seen them and they are so obviously nothing more than spam ... but what about headlines that may have some impact on a personal level.

I read an article the other day from an email specialist who was suggesting that spammers have a lot more success with headlines that have an impact on that personal level. His example was a spam email with the subject line 'Notice From Toyota' - obviously if you've never owned a Toyota that's not going to attract you but lots of people out there have owned Toyotas and would be very tempted to open that email.

Was it a product recall? Was it some special offer to lure them back to the Toyota fold? Whatever it might be Toyota owners would be very tempted to open an email when they saw that in the subject line.

In our situation we wouldn't want them to be opening emails but we would want our headlines to attract people to click through to our advertising or our sponsors. And why couldn't we use headlines for our ads that are quite different to the theme of the free site or gallery that we place the advertising on?

As I said at the start, this is a brain doodle and nothing here might work for you. It almost certainly won't work if you take what I've said and try it without developing it further. But somewhere in there may be the twisted hint that might spark something in your mind that will make you some serious money.